Dora the Explorer swings into her motion-picture debut on a pitch that could only have come from a studio executive with money to burn on intellectual property extension in Dora and the Lost City of Gold. A 1990s throwback to high-concept TV adaptations such as The Brady Bunch Movie and George of the Jungle, Flight of the Concords co-creator James Bobin’s live-action sequel to the wholesome series for children sets up its tent in the genre campground of young adult adventure movies, despite the franchise’s much younger fanbase. That quality of being neither here nor there, about teens but aimed at everyone from preschoolers to their parents, might be appropriate for a story about a jungle-dwelling wild child displaced to the city. But it makes for a strained and often charmless experience, despite the colourful sets, committed performances and relentless cheer.

Eva Longoria, Moner, Michael Pena.Paramount

After a brief prologue that introduces us to the beloved characters’ real-life avatars as adolescents, we skip ahead a few years to take up with a now teenaged Dora, played with the right mix of wide-eyed curiosity and a magnet school (think gifted program) kid’s smug superiority by Nickelodeon star Isabela Moner. Worried that their teen prodigy isn’t fulfilling her potential in the jungle, Dora’s anthropology professor parents (played with game sincerity by Michael Pena and Eva Longoria) send her off to the city to do some “real exploring” and reconnect with her now lanky, sullen cousin Diego (Jeff Wahlberg).

Before she can be socialized, Dora finds herself kidnapped by treasure hunters and dragged back to the jungle in search of her missing parents in the middle of a class field trip with Diego and new friends Randy (Nicholas Coombe) and Sammy (Madeleine Madden).

Rather than blow out one of Dora’s modest small-screen adventures about learning new words and de-escalating conflicts, the film goes out of its way to play with the Dora mythos, such as it is, and wink at long-time fans who might conceivably feel the bittersweet pangs of nostalgia whenever Dora so much as greets her backpack and calls it Backpack.

Bobin’s main gag, which owes a lot to the misplaced naïf trope running from Tarzan to Austin Powers, is to imagine Dora as an ageless cartoon girl warily circling a grownup world that doesn’t know what to do with her sunny disposition. Moner adeptly pitches specific moments — her insistence on anthropomorphizing her accessories and correcting the scientific principles behind strangers’ graphic t-shirts — between fish-out-of-water screwball comedy and narcissism, though it’s not clear whether we’re supposed to forgive all her sociopathic tendencies or not.

That wishy-washiness extends to the film’s ideological undertones, which are muddled to say the least. Dora’s woke critique of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick on her first day of school sets the tone for a performatively liberal take on the character’s adventures that’s out of sync with its colonial story beats and fetishization of both the jungle and Dora’s Latina roots. Though Dora and her parents take great pains to establish that the family’s research is based in exploration, not appropriation, the two look awfully similar in the film’s candy-coloured jaunt through the jungle, and the cringeworthy peppered-in Spanish and Inca phrases resemble the recent Democratic primary debate where Beto O’Rourke and Cory Booker fell over themselves to spout the most non-English aphorisms.

The real question is not why the filmmakers feel so anxious to cover all these political bases but whether anyone really needs a new take on Dora, given the show’s ongoing success. There’s a lack of conviction in the jokes about Dora’s compulsion to break the fourth wall to ask whether we the audience can say things like “delicioso” or “severe neurotoxicity.” After all, isn’t part of the show’s appeal that Dora invites kids to solve riddles, expand their vocabularies and indulge their inner know-it-all? In balking at the series’ educational nature, Bobin and screenwriters Nicholas Stoller and Matthew Robertson fail to understand, let alone translate, these stories’ appeal as 21st-century conduct manuals for young ruffians.

It’s no surprise that the film is at its most engaging, for kids as well as their chaperones, when it allows itself to be delighted rather than embarrassed by its source. That’s especially true of a refreshingly odd animated sequence that uses the troupe’s accidental ingestion of hallucinogens — it really is a jungle out there — as a prompt to tap into the series’ stylistic roots. If there’s any lost gold to be found, it’s in these moments of natural, not forced, levity, where this feels like a real movie for kids rather than one delivered largely in quotations by tongue-tied adults.